PITTSBURGH SEMINARY PROFESSOR RELEASES BOOK ABOUT CONGREGATIONAL RECONCILIATION
The Rev. Dr. Leanna Fuller, Joan Marshall Associate Professor of Pastoral Care at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary, has published Embodied Reconciliation: Congregational Healing as Pastoral Care (Fortress Press, 2026).
“This book is aimed at a broad audience: congregations, leaders, and members,” Dr. Fuller says. “My hope is to provide resources and guidance for faith communities who have been through a period of tension and find that the present environment still feels fraught. When a whole group has hurt and been hurt by each other, how does a community heal? There need to be ways of tending to communities in these positions.”
Embodied Reconciliation focuses on four main sets of practices for embodying reconciliation as and in community: truth telling, grieving and lamenting, confessing and repenting, blessing and releasing. Dr. Fuller names the pervasiveness of conflict in faith communities—and, in particular, the lack of public scholarship which deals with tension in a community’s history, not just in its present—as what led her to develop this resource. “Reconciliation is not ‘going back to the way things were before’; it’s finding a way forward as a community, together, from where we actually are,” she says. “I hope this resource will help with the other side—after a community has made a controversial decision, for example, and many people have left over it. I hope faith communities will feel more equipped to think and talk about these things together, to think about how to order common life in ways that help them heal.”
A pastoral practitioner before becoming a scholar, Dr. Fuller’s academic journey has been shaped by a desire to better understand congregational wellness and to equip faith communities to navigate conflict and other challenges faced in life together in healthy ways. She is the author of When Christ’s Body is Broken: Anxiety, Identity, and Conflict in Congregations (Pickwick, 2016), and she has published additional works in Journal of Religious Leadership, Journal of Pastoral Theology, Ecclesiology, and others. She also regularly releases works of public scholarship through channels such as The Christian Century, The Presbyterian Outlook, Faith and Leadership, and others. Dr. Fuller is active in both academic and ecclesial circles, teaching and preaching in congregations locally and presenting nationally at conferences such as the annual meetings of the American Academy of Religion and the Academy of Religious Leadership. Before entering the academy, she served as associate pastor of Oakland Christian Church (Suffolk, Va.) and as chaplain resident at Riverside Regional Medical Center (Newport News, Va.). Dr. Fuller is a graduate of Vanderbilt University (Ph.D.), Vanderbilt Divinity School (M.Div.), and Furman University (B.A.). She is an ordained minister in the United Church of Christ.